Some time ago I converted my rotary table into a dividing head using a stepper motor, Arduino nano and a stepper motor driver. The setup incorporated a basic two line LCD display and rotary encoder as the GUI and user input device respectively.

Operation was very basic, with a basic menu driven system to set number of steps / turns per degree and choose the mode of operation (degrees or divisions per increment).

Someone asked me about this the other day so I posted the files up on GitHub along with some photos of the set up. There should be enough detail in the photos and code comments to allow you to replicate this. It is pretty basic.

I've been a long time supporter / user of open source EFI systems and have been playing with Speeduino for the past year or so. Speeduino is an Arduino based EFI system that uses a custom shield to provide the necessary signal processing to interface the Arduino to the engine sensors, coils and injectors allowing it to control the engine.

It is also possible to use Speeduino without the injectors (ie spark-only), turning it into a well featured ignition system, which is very useful for those of us who want to run a distributor-less ignition system without paying a heap of cash.

I previously waxed lyrical about the Sienci DIY milling machine in DIY CNC Milling machine. Well since that particular post I have received pretty much all of the parts I need to build my own (improved) version.

The biggest diversion away from the original Sienci machine is that I have decided to use a standalone dedicated controller instead of the Arduino Uno used by the original Sienci. I have coupled this with some 3.5amp stepper drivers and some 2.8amp Nema 24 motors. Unfortunately the motors were lost in transit and the vendor refunded my my money. So having to re-order motors I managed to find a set of slightly larger Nema 24s that ran at 3.5amps (and 3.1nm) which are the maximum that I can run on the stepper drivers that I purchased. (The stepper drivers will peak at 4amp but we should be looking at working to a max duty cycle.) At any rate the larger Nema 24 motors are much bigger than the previous Nema 14s used by Sienci and offer obvious advantages when milling aluminium an other harder materials.

A while ago I invested in a bunch of home automation stuff to augment my Google home. I opted on the Sonoff devices as they are by far the best value and also come with Aussie compatible plugs and sockets. Unfortunately one of the units was DOA.

In a bid to try and resuscitate the device I decided to have a go at re-flashing the firmware with the updated Tasmota firmware. The Tasmota firmware is a third party developed firmware that adds a bunch of features to Sonoff devices, including removing some communications limitations. This last feature is one that I'm particularly interested in installing into some other 4.22mhz transmitters so that they become more usable (communications are very limited in the Ewelink app), so this initial experiment to see if the firmware upgrade works is a bit of a test. If all goes well I'll look to update my other Sonoff devices.

Now this is a cool project. I have one of those VR headsets that you can put your iPhone into, but the main issue is that there is no easy pathway to using it as a monitor unless you jailbreak the phone. I tried in vain for a while to set it up so that we could play minecraft but had limited success. Other options seemed to be get an android device or a Samsung Galaxy. This on the other hand looks like it will do the job nicely

Some home automation stuff for later digestion...I have been blown away by the capability of the Sonoff-Tasmota firmware for the Sonoff devices. These, combined with a Raspberry Pi loaded with Node-Red and a MQTT...

Following on from P38 Touch screen media player - Part 1 the Raspi touch screen arrived a week or so ago and I've been itching to see if it fits. I did a quick offer-up when it arrived and it looked as though it might be a bit small, so I've been keen to find out.

Tonight I removed the old screen and installed the new one. Unfortunately my suspicions were correct - the new screen is not tall enough and so leaves a gap at the top / bottom. The issue is simply that screen aspect ratios have changed since the P38 was a current model. The old 4:3 aspect ratio has now been superceded by 16:9, or wide screen / letterbox aspect. The result is that it is like looking at a widescreen movie on an old TV - you get a black stripe at the top and bottom of the screen - or in this case a gap.

For a while now I've been thinking of building a small CNC mill so that I can mill aluminium stuff. For the most part I want to build it so that I can mill cylinder heads and pistons for aircooled VWs, which is another passion of mine (after software). I already have a large manual mill which replaced a small mill which I was consequently considering converting to CNC, but then stumbled across a kick-starter project called the Sienci Mill. https://sienci.com/product/sienci-mill-one-kit/

Traditionally I've always blogged about software related stuff here at DeeEmm.com and left blogging about my other hobbies for one of the many other sites that I have (or used to have).

As time has gone on I've found that I have less time to run a multitude of sites, especially as in general none of the sites are what you would consider successful. This in part is my own doing as I have always refused to try and leverage the sites popularity to earn money from advertising, instead preferring the nice clean look of an ad-free site. And so over time, my available time to contribute to keeping sites updated had dwindled and so many of the sites have simply faded out, to be no more.

For some reason the devs responsible for the latest OSX update have decided that the media buttons should control whatever media player last had focus. This means that they now seem to have a mind of their own and do not solely control iTunes, which is a great big PITA if you ask me. It's evidently not a bug, but a feature - lol

Fortunately Milan Toth has written an app that reverses this annoying 'improvement', which you can download from the link below.

I always wanted the sat nav unit for my P38, but being an optional extra that wasn't originally supplied with my car I had to make do with a cubby hole instead. I did consider installing one a few times, but the cost of the unit and the fact that it is now 20 year old tech with outdated maps and bitmapped graphics just wasn't worth the effort, even if it did mean I could hack in a reversing camera. So a recent stumble across a cheap sat nav head unit whilst looking for a new drivers door lock seemed like an opportunity not to be missed. The sat nav unit is missing the box of tricks that contains the actual brains of the unit, but as I am not planning to set it up in its original configuration, that is unimportant.

My plans for this unit are to junk the internals and replace the screen with a small colour touch screen that interfaces to a RaspberryPi running some form of media player. I currently use my iPhone to play tunes via a bluetooth-FM adaptor. Previous to this I used the blackbox CD - iPod adaptor but now that the connectors have changed that's not an option any more. If the media player can also provide some additional functions such as Sat-Nav, Phone controls and maybe even a reversing camera, that'd be great, but they're not essential.

So the next steps are to wait for the unit to get here so that I can determine what size touch screen will work. Touch screens are cheap and plentiful from aliexpress just need to know what size. The touchscreen will need a HDMI input or adaptor to be able to interface with the Raspi, some also come with a dedicated composite input for a camera that is automatically selected when the input is detected. I already have a Raspi unit and from a quick google it seems like Xbian is a common choice for the operating software so will take a look at that too. The tricky part will be figuring out how to get it to interface with the audio system. I suspect that the easiest way to do this is to hack the black box iPod adaptor.

If, like me you are a die-hard Apple fan you have no doubt embraced all of Apples products including the sometimes not so magic, Magic Mouse. Whilst it's a great piece of design, the touch sensitive top is not for everyone (my wife hates it). It also has another annoying limitation when used with products like Autodesk's Fusion 360 - it has no middle button.

Not having a middle button makes navigating with Fusion 360 and absolute PITA, panning and orbiting require several clicks to enable, use and then disable the pan and orbit functions which does not make for a particularly smooth workflow, in fact it is downright annoying. Unlike Fusion 360's predecessor, 123Design, there is no orbit on the right click as this action has been replaced by a shortcut menu, there is also no keyboard shortcuts available to enable pan and orbit functions.

All is not lost however as there is a great little system tray app that solves this problem (and probably a few other problems that I have yet to discover). MagicPrefs is an app that extends the magic mouse's functionality by allow you to assign gestures and taps to trigger custom functions, including, yes you guessed it - a middle click. With the middle click option enabled Fusion 360 all of a sudden becomes much more usable, whats more it is absolutely free.

You can download it from the magicprefs website - http://magicprefs.com

So many of you will be familiar with the site as a result of the plugins and modules that I used to offer. Whilst I have restored the sites main content, at this point I have not yet restored the web-store.

Whilst selling plugins and modules may seem a lucrative endeavour, the amount of resources required to develop and maintain the code is not trivial. The support request expectations for $3 plugins is often surprisingly unreasonable. The support ticket system takes a lot to maintain, especially when it is only me providing the support, and there are subscriptions to maintain, often costing orders of magnitudes more than the plugins actually bring in. All of this was okay when I had time to spare, but being relatively time poor (I work a LOT), there simply is not enough time in the day to do everything that I want to do.

So at this point I am not sure if I will reinstate the store. (I even toyed with the idea of not reinstating the site, but I came to the conclusion that I had too much of a soft spot for it and so it needed to live again). I have previously toyed with the idea of simply releasing all of the plugins for free, and this is probably the path that I will tread but for the time being I am happy to simply have the site back up and have somewhere to talk tech related garbage.

If you have interest in a particular module or plugin please let me know in the comments below.

After a hiatus of several months the site is back up. The site was unfortunately victim to some script kiddies and fell under the scrutiny of my hosting provider. After a failed attempt to rewind to a previous backup, which turned out to be corrupt, I decided that rather than spend a bunch of time that I did not have spare trying to fix it, I would simply turn the server off and get back to it later. Of course I did not consider that 'later' may stretch to be several months but that's just the way it panned out to be.

So I finally got some free time and decided to take a look at getting the server back up and running. The original issue with the original server was that due to a kernal issue with the server itself, the backup service provided by my host generated corrupted backups, so reinstalling from a backup invariably led to a bricked server. I spent some time working with the host to get the server repaired and whilst I did get a server that I could SSL into I unfortunately did not get any further as the SQL service would not run due to toasted database files.

So with renewed enthusiasm to get the site back up the first thing I did was to create a new server instance. Might as well start afresh, especially with the kernel issue - a problem I did not want to walk back into. I then grabbed all of the database files from the original server which were located at /var/lib/mysql/"DB-Name"

MySql is great in that you can simply physically copy the files from one database to another and the database will become available, however there are some caveats to this.